Nicole M. Joseph is an associate professor with tenure of mathematics education in the department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University. She is also the Associate Dean of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at Peabody College. She directs the Joseph Mathematics Education Research Lab (JMEL), an intergenerational lab that focuses on training and mentoring its members on Black Feminist and intersectional epistemological orientations. Using critical perspectives, JMEL produces theoretical and methodological scholarship that challenges hegemonic notions of objectivity to emphasize more humanizing, empowering, and transformative research.
Dr. Joseph’s research explores two lines of inquiry, (a) Black women and girls, their identity development, and their experiences in mathematics and (b) gendered anti-blackness, whiteness, white supremacy and how these systems of oppression shape Black girls’ learning, access, underrepresentation, and retention in mathematics across the pipeline.
Her scholarship is published in top-tiered journals such as Educational Researcher, Review of Educational Research, Teachers College Record, Harvard Education Review, and the Journal of Negro Education. Her recent new book with Harvard Education Press is called Making Black Girls Count in Math Education: A Black Feminist Vision of Transformative Teaching.
She is also the founder and director of Black Girls Becoming Summer Research Institute, a two-week residential program at Vanderbilt for rising 7th and 8th grade Black girls focused on a holistic STEAM curriculum. Her most recent funded project includes co-designing and validating a measure of mathematics identity that includes intersectionality-barriers and intersectionality-assets. Dr. Joseph designed this measure with adolescent Black girls ages 8-13 and has worked to collaborate with districts to support the mathematics achievement and identity of all Black girls.